In this episode, we interviewed Claudia Faith - an AI implementer with a master's in AI who writes Level Up With AI, a Substack newsletter for creators and solopreneurs who are done collecting tools and want working systems

Claudia has spent years implementing AI inside real businesses - from clinics to manufacturers - and runs her entire operation of three newsletters, a live community and a line of digital products on AI workflows she builds and tests herself before publishing

Her core argument: collectors think in features, operators think in workflows - and the workflow, not the tool, is where all the money and every real result lives

Key takeaways:

🔗 Connect with Claudia

I'm Claudia Faith, I hold a master's degree in AI, and I've spent years implementing AI inside real businesses, from clinics to manufacturers, alongside writing Level Up With AI, a Substack newsletter for creators and solopreneurs who are done collecting tools and want working systems. Most AI creators learned ChatGPT six months before their audience did; I come at it from the other side, with formal AI training and business implementations behind me, and my newsletter is the output of that practice, every workflow runs in a real business before readers ever see it.

The AI education space splits into two useless camps: hype merchants promising you'll make $10K in 30 days, and tool reviewers who can name 50 apps but can't show you a single working workflow. Meanwhile the solopreneurs succeeding with AI use maybe three tools, deeply. Collectors think in features. Operators think in workflows, and the workflow is where all the money is. Nobody was teaching the operator side: how to take one repeatable process in your business, rebuild it with AI inside, measure the result, and move to the next one. I'd spent years doing exactly that inside companies, where AI has to survive budgets, compliance, and skeptical teams, and I realized solopreneurs needed the same discipline, just at their scale. That's what I write about every week.

My readers on Substack are mostly one-person companies, so "shipping" means publishing consistently without burning out. Take my weekly batch system, which readers have copied for their own newsletters. Every Sunday, one working session produces the full week: articles drafted in my voice, headlines tested against proven formulas, header images generated via API, and 21 short-form posts scheduled for daily publishing. The key piece is a voice profile, a document that captures how I actually write, built once by analyzing my past posts. Teaching the AI my voice once and reusing that profile forever was the gamechanger. Writers who set this up go from publishing when they find time to publishing on a schedule their audience can rely on. Consistency is the whole game on Substack.

They buy tools instead of changing workflows. A team licenses an AI assistant for everyone, adoption sits under 10 percent, and leadership concludes AI doesn't work for their business. The tool was never the problem. Nobody picked one painful, repeatable process and rebuilt it end to end with the AI inside it. A tool license is a cost. A rebuilt workflow is an asset. I see the same failure in solo businesses, just cheaper: subscriptions to a dozen AI apps and not one automated process to show for it. The fix is identical at any company size. Treat AI like a new hire: give it one job, check its work, expand its responsibilities as it earns trust.

Claude Code is the backbone, and most people still think it's only for programmers. I've turned it into a full content studio: custom skills for article writing, Notes generation, carousel design, image creation through the Gemini API, even scraping my own engagement data to see what actually resonates with readers. The weekly non-negotiable is my Sunday batch session, one sitting that produces the entire week of content across formats. I'd rather run three tools deeply than demo thirty. Beyond Claude, it's Gemini for visuals and a handful of Python scripts the AI wrote for me.

Less writing than people assume, more editing and testing. My articles publish on a fixed weekly schedule whether I feel inspired or not, so Sundays are batch production and weekdays are refinement, community, and building. A real chunk of every week goes to workflows that fail. For every AI workflow I publish, three died quietly on my laptop. That failure rate is the actual job, and it's exactly why the newsletter is useful, because readers only get the survivors. There's also this layer, which might be the most important one yet: studying my engagement data to see which formats actually grow the list, connecting with other humans and answering subscriber replies one by one.

Within 12 months, the creator economy splits into people who sell content and people who sell systems, and systems win. Courses that explain AI are already losing to products that hand you a working workflow: a skill file, a prompt system, a template you install and run the same day. I've watched this shift in my own products, where packaged, ready-to-run AI skills outsell anything that just teaches. Creators have stopped paying to learn about AI. They pay for something that works on their own business by Friday. My money is on solo operators with documented, sellable workflows out-earning much larger content teams, because a system built once sells a thousand times while an article gets read once.

Start with Level Up With AI on Substack, subscribing gets you one tested workflow in your inbox every week. If you run a business and want help implementing AI in your own operations, that side of my work lives at Berg Studio, where the first step is a free call to find one process worth automating.